ABSTRACT
Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles, where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous “armed response.” This obsession with physical security systems, and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environ-
ment of the 1990s. Yet contemporary urban theory, whether debating the role of electronic technologies in precipitating “postmodern space,” or discussing the dispersion of urban functions across poly-centered metropolitan “galaxies,” has been strangely silent about the militarization of city life so grimly visible at the street level. Hollywood’s pop apocalypses and pulp science fiction have been more realistic, and politically perceptive, in representing the programmed hardening of the urban surface in the wake of the social polarizations of the Reagan era. Images of carceral inner cities (Escape from New York, Running Man), high-tech police death squads (Blade Runner), sentient buildings (Die Hard), urban bantustans (They Live! ), Vietnam-like street wars (Colors), and so on, only extrapolate from actually existing trends.
